Italy's Prisons, Overcrowded and Now Overheated, Draw Foreign Scrutiny

Italy's prisons, already strained by overcrowding, have faced a further pressure this summer: heat. The New York Times reported this week that as temperatures in the country continue to approach 90 degrees Fahrenheit, inmates have been sleeping on concrete cell floors, and that even the guards have complained.

The report does not present the heat as an isolated event. It describes a prison system where the summer has compounded conditions that were already the subject of international scrutiny — the ratio of prisoners to available space, and the capacity of old buildings to cope with a warming climate.

The story arrives in a season when much of Italy has been under heat advisories, and when the country's infrastructure has been tested by temperatures that once would have been exceptional. Prisons are among the least adaptable buildings in that test: they cannot open windows freely, cannot relocate, and cannot send their population home.